Isabella Solar Villaseca
Underströmmar och strider
Sven and Ellida Hjort’s Grant Exhibition
21 Feb–29 Mar 2026 

Vernissage: 20 Feb, 18.00–21.00
Guided tour and Artist talk: 5 Mar, 18.00 (in collaboration with KKV Monumental)

In Underströmmar och strider (Depths and Battles), Isabella Solar Villaseca presents a new series of large-scale sculptures and installations. They unfold from a photo album sent by her family in Sweden to relatives in Chile – images of family and friends, spending time together, celebrating and dancing. In the artworks, the artist draws attention to what glimpses in the backgrounds of living rooms and community centers: the wallpaper’s faded tulip, the unyielding surface of a radiator and a rough-cast façade. The familiar fragments bear witness to both the interior design ideals and the housing policies that framed the life lived within these walls. The sculptures are accompanied by a soundscape sampling South American songs, the official ceremonies of the welfare state, and 1990s sentimental power ballads. Together, the artworks approach a sense of melancholy and longing, through which Solar Villaseca explores how the diasporic community is shaped as much by the architecture of the home as by care for one another.

Isabella Solar Villaseca (b. 1992, based in Malmö and Copenhagen) works with installation, sculpture, text and video. Drawing on archival material, she explores how history, politics and architecture shape our present. She creates works that move between the concrete, the theatrical, and the poetic, with collective experience and the spaces we inhabit at their core. Solar Villaseca was educated at the Bergen Academy of Art and Design and the Royal Danish Academy of Fine Arts in Copenhagen. She has previously exhibited, among others, at Overgaden, Vermilion Sand, and the Latvian Centre for Contemporary Art, and has presented films at festivals such as the 35th European Media Art Festival in Osnabrück and CPH:DOX.

Isabella Solar Villaseca is the 2025 recipient of the Sven and Ellida Hjort’s Exhibition Grant, awarded annually to a young and promising artist in Skåne. The recipient is selected by a jury appointed by the board of Skånes konstförening. The 2025 jury consisted of Khamlane Halsackda, Vladimir Okhnich, and Anna Zingmark.

The exhibition is presented with a newly written text by the artist Anneli Ström Villaseca.

Curators: Albin Hillervik and Janneke Schoene
Sound composition: Stephen McEvoy and Isabella Solar Villaseca
Graphic design: Amanda Do
Technicians: Linus Svensson and Jesper Veileby

Special thanks to: Tawanda Appiah, Hugo Chang Coffey, Maria Jacobson, Else-Marie Nilsson, Marcus Sjögren, Peter Sjögren and Carolina Solar Villaseca